A Traveller Information System: Minimisation of the Number of Graphs’ Nodes Involved When Processing Route Requests

The number of people using public transport is continuously increasing. Transport companies want to fulfil travellers’ expectations wherever possible. However, the great number of public transport companies operating in the same area can sometimes confuse travellers as to which route they should take and how to obtain the information relative to their journey. In this paper we suggest integrating several traveller information systems from different companies into the same multimodal information system, offering companies the choice not to share their data. This encourages them to join the system. Additionally, we have minimised the number of nodes involved when processing travellers’ requests in order to simplify the calculation process. To put our plan into action, we have opted for a multi-agent system coupled with the Voronoi decomposition for managing the network

An Improved Biogeography-Based Optimization for the Long-Term Carpooling Problem

The increasing number of vehicles on the road produces negative effects for health, the environment, quality of life, and the economy, among other areas. To address this problem, an important key is carpooling private vehicles from different homes to a common destination. This paper specifically addresses the long-term carpooling problem, which is an NP-complete problem. The proposed approach is a modified biogeography-based optimization metaheuristic, which is hybridized with a variable neighborhood search. Comparisons with efficient known approaches indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for large-scale long-term carpooling problems